by David Mack
“No, I understand perfectly,” Quinn said. “If I got busted on Vanguard, Ganz would’ve whacked me in the brig. If I made it here, you’d kill me and take the guns.” Cautiously, he pulled his left hand out of its pocket. “I’m changing the deal.” He held up his left hand to reveal a small, rapidly blinking device. His thumb kept a small red switch on its side pressed in. “Dead-man switch. One kilo of ultritium in each case. I let go of this without keying off those detonators, anybody inside half a klick’s gonna have a real bad day. Comprende?”
No longer smirking, Broon made a slow, cautious gesture to his men to lower their weapons. He kept his eyes on Quinn the entire time. “We don’t have the dilithium,” Broon said. “It wasn’t part of our deal.”
“Make me an offer,” Quinn said, inching his pistol from its holster. “Make this trip worth my time.”
“First we need to set terms,” Broon said. “How is this going to go?”
Quinn tried to keep tabs on where all of Broon’s men were. A few had slipped behind his ship, maybe hoping to tackle him and seize the dead-man switch. He pivoted slowly to keep them at bay. “You’re gonna find some way to pay for these guns,” Quinn said. “Then you’re gonna put the payment on my ship, and I’m gonna leave.” He noted the snipers adjusting their aim. “As soon as I’m clear of the docking pit, I’ll key off the detonators.”
“Ridiculous,” Broon said. “As soon as you’re clear, you’ll blow us to bits.”
Shaking his head, Quinn said, “No, ’cause my boss is your insurance. If I kill you, he kills me. My way, we both live.”
“Until Ganz sees you alive,” Broon said. “Then I’m a dead man.” He looked at his men. “We all are.”
A puff of cigar smoke passed through Quinn’s best trust me grin. “Not if you make good by paying for the guns,” he said. “Call it a show of good faith.”
“Orions don’t believe in good faith,” Broon said. “They believe in contracts and revenge. My contract is to kill you.”
“And mine’s to sell you a bunch of guns. I prefer mine.”
Broon glowered at Quinn for a long moment, then walked slowly toward the rows of crates. “An impasse,” he said. “That’s what we have.” Resting his hands on top of a crate, he continued, “Unless, of course, one of us backs down.” He looked over his shoulder at Quinn. “I have to wonder…where would a fringe-prospecting loser like you get his hands on twenty-four kilos of ultritium?” Caressing the edge and corners of the lid, he added, “You wouldn’t just make that up, would you?” His hands cupped the flip-latches of the crate lid. “No, of course not. That would be stupid. Suicidal, even.”
Quinn aimed his pistol at Broon. The gunmen on every side of him lifted their own weapons back into firing positions.
“Don’t open that crate,” Quinn said. The pistol quaked slightly in his hand.
“Or what, Mr. Quinn? You’ll stun me?” He flipped the latches open. “Why not just blow me up?”
“Don’t make me tell you again,” Quinn said. “Seal those latches and step back.”
Broon left one hand gripping the handle of the lid as he turned to face Quinn. “Ganz told me you were a lousy poker player, Quinn. You don’t know how to bluff.” He flipped open the lid—revealing a circular disk of weapons-grade ultritium secured to its underside, as well as the blinking detonator affixed to its center. His jaw dropped in horror.
Quinn shouted, “Are you crazy? You could’ve set it off!” Broon didn’t respond, he just stood and stared at the munitions charge half a meter from his face. “Close that lid very gently,” Quinn said. “And the rest of you—put down your damn guns.” At first only a few of Broon’s men laid down their weapons, but within seconds they all did. “Slide ’em toward me,” he said, making certain to hold his dead-man switch high over his head for all to see. Looking back at Broon, he saw the big man easing the lid closed with almost comical slowness. “That’s it,” Quinn said to him, “nice and—”
The detonator fell off the ultritium charge. Then the munition fell from the lid, revealing itself as a hollow fake.
Damn cheap glue, Quinn fumed.
Broon reached for a pistol tucked into his belt. “Kill—”
Quinn’s first shot knocked Broon backward over the crate. Dodging for cover under the wing of his ship, he managed to take down a gunman who was reaching for his rifle. Only nine to go, Quinn thought. He hoped for a quick demise. On every side, he heard Broon’s men scooping up their rifles. He wedged himself inside the port-side landing strut, hoping it might limit to six the number of people who were about to kill him.
He closed his eyes and fired blind. Multiple screeching rifle shots overlapped all around him. Half a second later, he was the only one firing. He took his finger off the trigger and opened his eyes.
All the gunmen lay stunned. Quinn looked at his stun pistol, then at the unconscious men. Did I do that? He looked again and realized that whatever weapon or weapons had incapacitated Broon’s thugs, it hadn’t been his crude sidearm. Letting his pistol lead the way, he crept away from the landing strut. At the edge of the wing he remembered the snipers. Peeking upward, he saw no sign of them. What the hell? Skulking around the gunmen, he stopped when he reached Broon, who looked up at him through glazed eyes that betrayed a grudging respect. “Snipers…” he croaked. “Very clever.” A gurgling noise rattled inside the man’s throat; then he passed out.
Surrounded by artfully wrought violence, Quinn realized what had happened; there was only one “logical” explanation.
T’Prynn.
A crueller man might have laughed.
A more noble man might have felt ashamed.
Quinn bound and gagged Broon and his gunmen, collected their weapons, loaded his crates back on to the Rocinante, and went in search of another buyer for his cargo.
Kirk was unaccustomed to having so many people on his bridge when there wasn’t a crisis. The Enterprise was en route back to Vanguard under routine conditions, but in the twenty-five hours since Xiong had divulged the classified details of his mission, Spock, Piper, and Scotty had been engrossed in fevered research of the data stored on Xiong’s tricorder. Spock and Piper had busied themselves at science station one, while Xiong and Scotty had been working at the station right next to them. For Scotty and Piper, the yeomen hadn’t been able to fetch coffee fast enough this evening.
Patiently waiting in the center seat, signing off on fuel-consumption reports and sipping long-since-cold coffee, Kirk had yet to hear a single report from anyone that explained what Xiong had revealed. Noting the hour, Kirk was about to turn in for the night when Spock called to him. “Captain.”
He joined Spock and Piper. The first officer looked no worse for his efforts, but the long hours had taken a terrible toll on the old physician. Kirk said, “What have you got?”
One of the overhead displays switched to a complex helical design composed of multitudes of colors. “The biological samples recovered by the Constellation crew included a unique and complex genetic material, Captain,” Spock said. “A team at Starfleet Research and Development has since named that gene sequence the Taurus Meta-Genome.”
“It’s like our DNA,” Piper said, “but a lot more complicated.”
“How much more?” Kirk’s real concern remained un-voiced: Complicated like warp-geometry calculus, or like Gary Mitchell on Delta Vega?
Enlarging the image on the overhead, Spock said, “The Taurus Meta-Genome contains a staggering quantity of raw information, encoded in a biochemical matrix. Compared with all currently known humanoid genetic material, it is more complex by several orders of magnitude.” Kirk did a double take, then looked again at the image with a new wonder and respect. Spock added, “Its value to science is potentially incalculable.”
“Coming from you, Mr. Spock, that means something.” Kirk looked at Piper. “Where did it come from?”
Piper pointed at a notation in fine print at the bottom of the screen. “Ravanar IV, Captain. A survey t
eam scraped it up with a simple mold. They didn’t know what they had until the Constellation was long gone from the system.”
Now Kirk had heard everything. “Mold?”
“Only the first six base-pairs seem directly related to the mold,” Piper said, pointing to the relevant molecules. “The next five pairs seem like barrier proteins, designed to keep the mold’s genetic data separate from the rest of the sequence.”
“So the mold is only a carrier?”
“Precisely, Captain,” Spock said. “There is also a repeating sequence, which might serve to prevent errors in replication. I have never seen such symmetry in a genome before. If I were to offer an educated guess, I would say that it was artificially engineered.”
Genetic engineering. Even the mention of it recalled for Kirk ethics lessons from Starfleet Academy on the evils of bioengineering for “eugenic” purposes. Despite his reasonable certainty that humanity’s failed efforts in that field were unrelated to what he was seeing here, a chill shook him. He put aside his gut reaction. “Is this a blueprint for a life-form?”
“Unlikely, sir,” Piper said. “Not unless it’s the size of a small moon. I think Mr. Spock hit the nail on the head when he said it looked like information storage. I’d say it’s raw data.”
The imprecision of it frustrated Kirk. “For what?”
Piper and Spock both wore poker faces. Finally, the first officer simply said, “Unknown.”
Seeking a new avenue of inquiry, Kirk said to Xiong, “This is why you were on Ravanar?”
Xiong looked up from his work at the adjacent station. “Yes, sir. I went in with the Sagittarius crew on an early mapping assignment.”
“And that’s when you found the artifact?”
“To make a long story short, yes.”
“There’s more on that, Captain,” Scott said. “Look here.” The entire group crowded around the second science station as Scott transferred his work to the overhead screen. Wireframe models were superimposed on virtual models of the intact artifact Xiong had discovered underground. “With the kind of power this thing must have had, its range would have been tremendous.”
Once again, the expertise of Kirk’s senior officers left him feeling half a step behind. “Its range, Mr. Scott? Range for what?”
Scott sounded shocked that he had to explain himself. “Broadcast, sir.” Waving toward the image on the screen, he continued, “I didn’t see it until Lieutenant Xiong showed me the whole works in one piece just now. Then it hit me—it looked like an oversized subspace relay coil.” Punching a few keys, he added some schematic data as an additional overlay. “These are the systems D’Amato scanned beneath the thing, before it blew up. You can gussy it up all you like, but the laws of physics don’t change. That is a subspace transmitter.”
It was Xiong’s turn to let his jaw hang open while he stared at the chief engineer’s work. “Commander Scott,” he said, “what would be the effective range of such a transmitter?”
“That size?” Scotty shrugged. “Huge, lad. If I had the time, maybe I could do the math and—”
“Approximately two hundred eleven point six light-years,” Spock said. “Assuming a power source sufficient to accelerate the coil’s primary oscillator to full velocity.”
Xiong looked at Kirk like a child pleading for Christmas gifts. “Captain, could we check the databanks for any unexplored M-Class or formerly M-Class planets within that radius of Ravanar IV? It might help direct the search for more artifacts or other samples of the meta-genome.”
Kirk nodded his assent to Spock, who leaned over the sensor hood and patched in to the ship’s computer library.
“Searching,” Spock said over the gentle hum and whir of the computer. “Several such planets are within the specified area.” He routed the data to the overhead, replacing the genome information with a star map.
Xiong studied it quickly, eyes darting from one highlighted name to another. “There,” he said, pointing. “Erilon.”
Calling up supplemental data, Spock read aloud, “Class-P, glaciated. No sign of intelligent life detected by remote survey probes. Believed to have been Class-M until approximately twenty-nine thousand years ago, when the companion of its primary star diminished in magnitude.”
“It’s near the Klingon border, right along the Endeavour’s patrol route,” Xiong said. “We could ask them—”
“Lieutenant,” Kirk said, cutting him off. “I’m not about to send another Federation starship on a wild-goose chase to a dead block of ice based on your hunch.” Gesturing at the star map, he continued, “There are dozens of candidates, and no reason to think that one’s a better bet than the others.”
“True,” Xiong said, “but it’s the only one on the list that has a Starfleet ship passing within one-point-five light-years in the next five days. Might as well start there.”
Before Kirk could rebut Xiong, Spock chimed in. “Logical.”
“Fine,” Kirk said. “Will the Endeavour crew know what they’re looking for?”
“They’ll know,” Xiong said. “We should notify them on a coded frequency.”
“Very well. Mr. Scott, Dr. Piper, continue your analysis and contact me if you learn anything new.” Kirk walked toward the turbolift. “Lieutenant Uhura, please help Mr. Xiong send a priority coded signal to the Starship Endeavour.” The turbolift door opened and Kirk stepped inside. “Mr. Spock, you have the conn.”
The doors closed as Kirk gripped the turbolift throttle. Watching the deck lights blur past, he grinned at the realization that he and Commodore Reyes would have much more to talk about at their next meeting than at their first. This time, Kirk promised himself, I’m getting some real answers out of him.
Lieutenant Moyer sat with her hands folded on the wardroom table and hurled questions at Commodore Reyes. He did his level best not to get out of his chair and strangle her. “Would you describe the workload of the Bombay crew as excessive?”
“No,” Reyes said, then heeded his counsel’s advice not to elaborate unless instructed to do so. It was the fourth day since Desai had overruled Liverakos’s motion to terminate the inquiry, and Reyes’s first day being deposed.
Moyer reviewed her notes. “How many separate action items did you assign to the Bombay on an average cruise?”
“The number varied.” The literal truth and no more. Next.
A predatory gleam seemed to brighten the prosecutor’s face. “On her last cruise, scheduled for a fifteen-day duration, you assigned the Bombay nine mission objectives in six star systems. Matériel transport to outposts on Ravanar and Getheon, colony visits to Talagos Prime, Jemonon, and Kilosa. An officer transfer to the Starship Endeavour. A reconnaissance assignment. Two star-mapping assignments. Was this level of activity typical aboard the Bombay since she was placed under your supervision?”
“No,” Reyes said. His throbbing pulse was giving him a headache, and his ears felt as though they must be glowing red. Just for practice, he smiled calmly at Moyer.
“Was the usual workload greater than what I’ve just described, or lesser?”
“Greater,” Reyes said.
His answer sent her scrolling through her notes. “Two days ago, fleet operations manager Raymond Cannella said that, quote, ‘The Bombay was our workhorse. She picked up all the slack.’ End quote. Yesterday, Vanguard executive officer Jonathan Cooper told this board that, quote, ‘No matter how much we asked Captain Gannon to do, she always got it done.’ End quote. In light of these statements, Commodore, do you think that it’s possible that the Bombay was overburdened?”
Defense attorney Liverakos raised his hand slightly from the table, which Reyes took as his cue not to answer. “Objection,” Liverakos said. “Calls for speculation, and seeks to ask my client to potentially indict himself.”
“Sustained,” Desai said from the head of the table.
Moyer didn’t seem the least bit fazed, and continued as if nothing had happened. “Commodore Reyes, could some of the tasks yo
u assigned to the Bombay on her last cruise have been assigned to either the Sagittarius or the Endeavour?”
“Not likely, no.”
“Why not?” The department heads in attendance all leaned forward to catch every nuance of his response.
Damn, an essay question. “Because their mission profiles are radically different. They aren’t suited for full-time support operations. Bombay was.”
“The Endeavour is a Constitution-class vessel, is it not?”
He could already see where Moyer was going, and he pitied her. It would be a long way for her to go to end up back where she started, but he played along, a polite captive to the legal process. “That’s right.”
“Aren’t starships of that class frequently called upon to carry colony supplies, transport critical components, and make new star surveys?”
“Yes.”
“So why haven’t you assigned some of that workload to the Endeavour in the months since it was detailed to your command? According to Vanguard’s operations records, every grid-check and regular colony tour for the past four months was conducted by the Bombay. What made the Endeavour exempt from these duties?”
“The fact that I needed her on a long-term patrol of the Klingon border,” Reyes said. “The Endeavour might be able to handle cargo delivery as well as the Bombay did, but the Bombay wouldn’t have provided the same level of deterrent to the Klingons as a Constitution-class starship.”
“I see.” Moyer nodded and made a notation on a small pad in front of her. “Surely, the Sagittarius could have made the occasional colony tour? Or handled the rush shipment of emergency supplies?”
He wondered if Moyer was making asinine assertions simply to fuel his temper and draw him out. If so, he would have to congratulate her later. “The Sagittarius has other assignments better-suited to her design and crew, Lieutenant. She’s an Archer-class scout vessel. She’s made to go very far, very fast, and not be noticed. She goes to the edge of nowhere and peeks behind the curtains. Her hold is barely large enough to carry her own mission supplies, never mind regular cargo deliveries. Using it for colony runs would be a waste.”